NBC Says Twitter Instigated Journalist's Suspension

The saga of Guy Adams, the Independentjournalist suspended from Twitter after a series of tweets critical of NBC, took an insidious turn on Tuesday as NBC claimed it filed its complaint about Adams at Twitter's behest. As you'll remember, the question at hand on Monday was whether Adams violated Twitter's policy when he posted the email address of NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel. That's still in question, but the new twist is that the complaint about Zenkel's email address apparently didn't originate with NBC, as NBC had first said on Monday. Rather, writes The Telegraph's Amy Willis, "Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sport’s vice-president of communications, said Twitter had actually contacted the network’s social media department to alert them to Mr Adams’s tweets." That suggests the micro-blogging site was monitoring Adams' highly critical tweets about NBC's Olympics coverage and alerted the network, with whom it's partnering to cover the games, when it found one it thought could give it a reason to suspend Adams' account. That does not sound like the action of a neutral player.

Adams follow-up correspondence with Twitter, which he documented in the Independent on Tuesday, raised more questions about whether he did, in fact, violate Twitter's policy. The tweet Twitter cited as violating its rule against posting personal email information read: "The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com." Adams' initial response was to point out that Zenkel's email was not a personal address but a corporate one, following the standard format of firstname.lastname@nbcuni.com, and which anyone could find with a few minutes of googling. Adams points out in his letter to Twitter that Twitter's own privacy policy states: "If information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the Internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation of this policy." Zenkel's email address most certainly was posted online prior to Adams sharing it. In a separate column, Adams wrote: "If it now displeases Mr Zenkel to get emails from those rightly-angry customers, then he is surely in the wrong job." Based on the popularity and content of #NBCfail and #Twitterfail hashtags, we're guessing Zenkel is not the only one with a seething inbox.

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